Ever wonder what it was like to grow up on a farm, the daily life, the work, the good times? These diaries from the Robinson and Via Family Papers are particularly vivid for detail of the daily operations of farming and family life during a time of increased farm mechanization and urbanization in the late 19th and into the 20th century. Each diarist using his or her own unique abbreviations and writing short cuts, details the farming operation on the Robinson farm, Ferndale Farm in Brandywine, Prince George's County, Maryland.
Ever wonder what it was like to grow up on a farm, the daily life, the work, the good times? These diaries from the Robinson and Via Family Papers are particularly vivid for detail of the daily operations of farming and family life during a time of increased farm mechanization and urbanization in the late 19th and into the 20th century. Each diarist using his or her own unique abbreviations and writing short cuts, details the farming operation on the Robinson farm, Ferndale Farm in Brandywine, Prince George's County, Maryland. The farm employed not only immediate family members, men, women, and children, but also African-American sharecroppers, tenant farmers and hired hands. The farming operation was carried out on acreage varying from over five hundred acres to less than two hundred, a large farm for southern Maryland. The principle crop was tobacco, and small grains. The diaries give accurate details abut technical aspects of farming along with its human and familial aspects. Through these diaries one gathers a sense of the place of the Robinson family in the community, their day to day concerns and inter family relationships, a expansive view into the social history of the mid-Atlantic.